A Conversa

This picture of a husband and wife came to Russia because of one man, Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow textile magnate who in these years was buying Matisse faster than anyone in France would. That patronage let Matisse take risks, and here the risk is the blue, a deep saturated field that fills most of the canvas and refuses to behave like a wall or a floor. Matisse stands at the left in striped pyjamas, his wife Amelie sits stiffly at the right, and between them a window opens onto a green garden, its iron railing curled into a shape long read as the word non. It plays like a quiet domestic standoff, morning in the household. Shchukin hung it in his Moscow mansion. After the Revolution the state seized his collection, and that is how a French couple's blue breakfast ended up in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.